Indigenous Partnerships in Knowledge and Northern Social Research.

Abstract

Much of the social science, humanities, and health research which has been done to date in the North, the subjects of this presentation, may not well serve the needs and interests of the northern peoples, however much the intentions were often good and some benefits were achieved. Much of the southern-initiated research assumes a superior base of knowledge. Yet, both local knowledge and comparative research from elsewhere in the world are often seen as valuable by local communities. Interestingly, the social sciences, health sciences, and humanities are going through a period of re-orientations and re-evaluations of their own at present. Important discipline-based science is now being developed outside of the urban centres of Western countries, and this process is leading to a diversification of research goals and ways of doing research. These networked global developments complement, and give additional impetus to the kinds of expectations northern peoples have for locally-shaped relations to outside researchers. The epistemological assumptions of social research and analysis are also changing as discipline-based researchers respond to critiques, especially that the way they write and think about science does not correspond to what they as researchers actually do. Social research is more complex than has been pretended, and yet it is much more like ordinary life. There is a growing realization of how decisively human research ties the researchers and others together in social processes linked to everyday life. These developments have profound implications for the way northern research should be conducted, and many of these implications parallel and complement the expectations for research relations which northerners have been expressing. I discuss here how some of these issues became clearer to me as I looked back on my own research experiences. I only slowly came to realize that in a very real and practical sense, I did not have Cree research "assistants," I was part of a joint research team, although I did not fully recognize it as co-research at the time. These new understandings of science and knowledge are being realized more widely in human research today. At the same time, researchers need to make such changes better known by the public and by the policy-makers.